Across our last six hearings, where do privacy leak risks appear — inconsistent redaction, metadata left behind, or wr…
Open the PDF you want to redact in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Go to Tools and select Redact.
Click Find and Remove Text.
Enter the word, phrase, or pattern you want to search for in the search box.
Choose the location to search (e.g., current document or all PDFs in a folder), then click Search.
Review the search results and check all instances you want to redact, or use Select All to mark every occurrence.
Click Mark for Redaction to mark the selected instances.
Click Apply Redactions and confirm when prompted to permanently remove the marked content.
CautionRedactions are permanent and cannot be undone after saving.
Best practiceYou can customize the appearance of redaction marks before applying them by adjusting settings in the Redact tool.
Best practiceAlways double-check your search term and results to ensure all sensitive information is covered, especially with patterns like SSNs.
Save the redacted PDF with a new file name.
You can use the Find Text and Redact feature to quickly locate and mark all instances of sensitive words or patterns for redaction throughout your document.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
Redacting content with Acrobat's tool permanently removes the underlying text or image data, making it unrecoverable. Drawing a black rectangle only covers the content visually. The original text or image data remains underneath and can often be easily copied, pasted, or revealed by others. Always use the specific redaction tools to ensure true data removal.
Redaction removes visible content, but PDFs can contain hidden data like metadata, comments, or revision history. This hidden data might still hold sensitive information. Sanitizing the PDF removes all this hidden data, ensuring that no sensitive details are accidentally left behind, making your document fully secure for sharing.
For many instances of PII like SSNs or account numbers, use Acrobat's pattern-based auto-redaction feature. This tool can find and mark all occurrences of specific patterns automatically, saving a lot of time. After auto-redaction, it's a good practice to have a second person (peer-QC) review a random sample of the document to ensure all sensitive data was correctly removed and nothing was missed.
A redaction code set is a list of reasons or categories for why information is being redacted (e.g., 'Privacy', 'Confidential', 'Attorney-Client Privilege'). Using a consistent code set across your team helps everyone understand why specific information was removed. It also ensures uniformity and compliance, especially in legal or regulatory contexts, making the redaction process clear and accountable.